[A Matter of Life and Death is a] striking example of the reinvention of the masque. This form of spectacle, combining elements of verse drama, dance, music, scenery and costume, was popular in aristocratic and court circles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Masques were usually allegorical, with a mythological scenario which could also be read in terms of contemporary politics. The court masque reached its height during the reign of James I, with the playwright Ben Jonson developing its dramatic structure by adding a comic prelude or 'anti-masque', and the architect Inigo Jones using the almost unlimited funds available to introduce for the first time all the machinery of modern theatre - artificial lighting, moveable sets and magical effects - to create 'pictures with Light and Motion'. .... It is by means of ... mythic association, together with the invocation of motifs from the two Shakespearian 'magic' plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, that A Matter of Life and Death creates its masque-like story. Its characters are indeed not realistic individuals, even by the standards of 40s cinema, but are emblematic and allegorical: the Poet, his Beloved, the Heavenly Messenger, the Magician. They move in equally symbolic spaces: the Other World; and on earth, the Seashore, the Wood, the Palace, and that modern temple of mysteries, the hospital. And the machinery of the spectacle - most notably the giant escalator and the celestial amphitheatre, but also such an ultra-filmic effect as the giant eyelid closing over the screen under anaesthesia - is as important as were Jones's stage 'machines' for Jacobean masques.

Throughout, A Matter of Life and Death shifts backwards and forwards between purely allegorical, or fantastic, scenes, and melodrama: that is, heightened realism, which is, in its deliberate exaggeration, equally contrived. For example, in the clip above, note the implausible isolation of Kim Hunter's character on a dark set lit principally by a lurid red offscreen source, and the presence of an exaggerated ticking clock on the soundtrack, not to mention the dialogue, which flirts with absurdity, notwithstanding the absolute conviction with which David Niven delivers his lines, and their undeniable emotional impact. But all this is still within the bounds of realism, unlike the film's distinctive representation of the afterlife. The clip below follows on immediately after the one above.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) famously begins with the narrator atop the World Trade Center in New York, enjoying the godlike perspective available from that vantage point. For de Certeau, this perspective fulfils the promise of the modern map, which produces knowledge through abstraction: by collating data and representing the results on an inhuman scale and from an inhuman viewpoint using the device of orthographic projection.[1] The viewer of the map is master of all he surveys, but only at the cost of alienation from the object of his knowledge.

De Certeau contrasts the map with the itinerary, the latter always implicitly tied to the point-of-view of a pedestrian, who is moving through the city rather than hovering above it. I have argued elsewhere (see this article and this chapter on 'The Spy as Flaneur') that Venice is the city of the itinerary par excellence, in part because it is almost impossible to obtain an elevated viewpoint: the only obvious platforms are the belltowers in San Marco and on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Everywhere else, lines of sight are cut off by the confines of particular streets or alleys or canals.

De Certeau’s schema does not, however, take account of another kind of looking: that of the pedestrian, lost on the ground, who pauses to look up. To look up is to remove oneself momentarily from the flow of traffic, since anyone adopting such a posture immediately becomes an obstacle to that traffic. To look up is to exchange negotiation for contemplation: to prostrate oneself before the object of one’s gaze; to acknowledge its power; to become vulnerable. In Venice, only tourists look up. Residents signal their proprietary relationship to the space they occupy by moving through it as aggressively and quickly as possible. For residents, up does not exist.

In an earlier post, I described how, according to a self-imposed rule, my early photographs of Venice had to depict a space from which a pedestrian could look back. By definition, this meant that I could not look up – unless I happened to be at the base of a bridge or some other elevated structure that incorporated a pedestrian thoroughfare (as in this example, which shows the bridge at Rialto).

In 2008, I returned to Venice after a three year absence, and I decided to reverse the terms of this original prohibition. Now I would only look up with the camera, and I would use a telephoto lens to isolate details, something I had avoided doing previously (most of the photographs in the main sequence were taken on a normal or wide-angle lens). I often carry out exercises like this when faced with a creative impasse: i.e. I do the opposite of whatever the previous rule was, and see what effect this has on the outcome.

What happens to photographic space when you look up? The photograph above and the four included in the previous two blog entries (here and here) show the results.

The visual iconography of Piazza San Marco is so inescapable and so familiar that it becomes an interesting exercise to see how much of the context can be removed before the subject becomes unrecognisable. I had previously conducted similar experiments with the human figure: How small does such a figure have to be on the negative before it ceases to be identifiable as a person? How large does it have to be before it becomes identifiable as a specific individual, who can theoretically be distinguished from other individuals on the basis of evidence provided by the photograph alone? I tried to work in the space between these two thresholds whenever possible (see nos 11, 12, 21 in the main sequence).

The image above literally has no background. Early photographs often have blown white skies as a result of the sensitivity of the emulsions to blue light. In such photographs, the sky is white because it contains an excess of light. Here the opposite is true. The sky contains no information whatsoever, which exaggerates the effect of decontextualisation, but the subject – reduced to a blank white flagpole and the tip of the belltower – is still unmistakeable.

It is a peculiarly defamiliarising effect to walk around San Marco and imagine that the space that matters is not the one under your feet but the empty layer of air above your head, but this effect was already anticipated in the opening chapter of Pistols! Treason! Murder!, in which the protagonist is suspended in mid-air in San Marco, asphyxiating at the end of a rope on a gallows.

[1] The earliest orthographic maps of Venice date from the early eighteenth century (although there is a solitary seventeenth-century example).

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Images and little details within: the excellent cartouches throughout; the Solomonic columns with spectacular capitals and how almost inky black foreground column is; the Rota Fortunae of characters with Crow in his appropriate place; Cur's harrowed reflection on the blade; pipework winding through the text during the banquet; the curlicue of the candle holders and the efficient linework used to indicate the direction of light outside Cuckoo's bedroom door; the fencing diagrams; Cuckoo's seduction scene; Gabriella a replica of a classical Venus in Magpie's dream - excellent.

My favourite piece of art is the beautiful bit of marbling, a mushrooming red blotch against the milk white of the page particularly because it was such a simple but bold and perfect visual analogue for the text.

I am currently working on Brethren, a novel; and other projects, including Reciprocity Failure (a novella illustrated with my own photographs) and Cartesian Blues (a graphic memoir illustrated by Dan Hallett). Many of the photographs to be included in Reciprocity Failure can be found at:

Most of the photographs displayed on this blog are my own. A few, however, are by other, more famous photographers (always credited), and are displayed for discussion purposes only under fair use guidelines. If any copyright holders object to their use here, I would be happy to remove them on request.